Energy Efficient Bread: How to Make Perfect Bannocks – Recipe | Felicity Cloake's How to Make the Perfect…

Bannock, from the Gaelic bannach, was once a generic term for bread in the north and west of these islands, where wheat and ovens were scarce . Although regional and historical variations abound (you can find a fruitcake recipe known as Selkirk bannock here), these days if you see a bannock on a menu, perhaps it comes with a bowl of soup or sausage and bacon, it will likely be a quick, flat bread much like a lightly crushed scone, cooked on a hot griddle and on your plate in minutes, ready to be loaded with salted butter.

The baker (possibly partisan) James Morton describes bannock as a "Shetland staple, the name of which is claimed by many Scottish cultures, but which today belongs to today at one" - and I've certainly never enjoyed it as much as on a recent trip to the more northern outpost - but you don't have to be at the same latitude as Greenland to appreciate the soft charms of bannock. Fast, frugal and endlessly versatile, in a winter when few of us rush to fire up the oven, bannock just might become your new best friend.

When I say they're versatile, I really. According to Regula Ysewijn, bannocks were made "with barley, oats, and sometimes a proportion of rye – anything that grew to harvest" in northern climates that were too cold and too wet for wheat; during my research, I find recipes using all of these things and more. Ysewijn's book Oats in the North, Wheat from the South even recommends chickpea flour, which is probably easier to find for many of us these days than pea flour or wheat flour, a ancient form of barley now grown in earnest only on Orkney and a handful of other locations (but available to buy online). Morton, who devotes half a chapter of his book Shetland to bannocks, acknowledges that until relatively recently they would have been made with "any kind of flour that people could get their hands on", but “Nowadays, refined wheat flour is the main ingredient of choice because it's the best. Honestly."

Most modern recipes indeed call for wheat flour, and if they originated in Shetland, they often express a strong preference for "' Voe' flour, a bleached flour, white flour with a high bicarbonate content" made in the village of the same name. In the interest of tradition, I'm trying Ysewijn's version, using one part wheat to four parts barley flour, and some floury Aberdeenshire Bannocks from Catherin...